THE COHEN INTERVIEWS KAY Mcdougall
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THE COHEN INTERVIEWS KAY McDOUGALL -- Interview no 14. Edited by Tim Cook and Harry Marsh Annotation research by Diana Wray Transcription by Josephine Green for WISEArchive ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is one of 26 interviews with social work pioneers conducted by the late Alan Cohen in 1980 - 81. The period of social work history Alan wished to explore with the interviewees was 1929 - 59. With one exception (No 24, Clare Winnicott) the interviews were unpublished until this edition in 2013. The copyright is held by the not for profit organisation WISEArchive. Each interview is presented as a free-standing publication with its own set of notes. However, readers interested in the Cohen Interviews as a whole and the period discussed are referred to: (a) the other 25 interviews (b) the Editors’ Introduction, (c) the select Bibliography. All of these can be found at http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/library/mrc/explorefurther/subject_guides/social_work ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Kay McDougall (nee Long) (1910—1999) was a psychiatric social worker, author, teacher, editor and diplomat in the field of social work politics. Alan Cohen encourages her to speak about all of these aspects of an outstanding career. She was remarkably successful in all of the projects she took on. For example, the launching of the Case Conference journal provided a platform for describing what social workers were doing, debating the ideas underpinning the work and examining the social policy implications. And her patient diplomatic skills were much needed over the long years of bringing the various professional bodies together into a unified British Association of Social Workers: she certainly earned membership card no 1. With some of his interviewees Alan is keen to explore their networks of influence and their important family and professional contacts. With Kay McDougall what strongly emerges is that her influence was based on her progressive personal values, particularly in the field of mental health, and her ability to connect social policies (or the lack of them) with their 1 impact on people. The Editors had the privilege of working with her on a national committee of Family Service Units in the1970’s and have clear memories of her personal concern for parents and children who were coping with awful life experiences, and of her ability to resolve issues through sheer common sense. She seemed unfazed by heated organisational blow-ups and, having read the Cohen interview, we now understand why. Joan Baraclough has written Kay’s entry in the Oxford DNB and cites one of her many value statements that bear repetition. “We cannot make our professional life a nine to five persona…the need for other interests and for not taking client problems home with us are important, but a profession is a way of life and not a job of work. We are judged in the end by how we are seen to behave towards clients and towards each other.” ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- . A.C. How did you come into social work? K.M. I think I had always been involved in a little way in something like social work. In that I used to be a bit of a leader at school and got troublesome fellow pupils hanging on; and I was, both in school and at guides. I was a Brown Owl! Really I was beginning to be interested in backward children, so that I used to write plays which had parts that the more backward children, who didn’t get much chance on the sports field and things like that, could take park. Then, more precisely, I used to go to WEA [1] classes. A.C. Was this in London? K.M. In London, in Morley College [2] which is a marvellous place. Then I chummed up with, amongst other people, Olive Botelle, who was then very active with work with the mentally subnormal for the London County Council (LCC) and she and others and I went to a WEA Summer School. Barbara Wootton [3] was the sort of head mistress of the school, and Olive had been to Hillcroft College [4] and she said, ‘Why don’t you try and get into Hillcroft?’ So I did. There were a lot of people at Hillcroft who were on the fringes of social work then: it wasn’t so much of a paid job then. This was about 1932 something like that. When I was at Hillcroft I’d got a holiday job at an approved school and I thought I might not mind residential work. So I fished around and got an interview at a child guidance council, and through that got a job as Assistant Matron at the first school for maladjusted children, which was at Northampton, Dallington Home. [5] So I worked there as an Assistant Matron but the school which was then set up in (for then) a very modern way, was visited monthly by a psychiatrist and a psychologist from the child guidance clinic, the Canonbury Clinic.[6] I think it was at Canonbury. So that got me more interested and I then applied for a WEA Scholarship because I saw you had to have a University education, and I got an Ernest Cassel Scholarship[7] from London University to go to London School of Economics.[8] I did a Social Science Diploma there, but because I had been to Hillcroft for a year and also taken both, Summer Schools and a three year Economics Course they let me take the one year Graduate Course and so I took the one year course, and while I was doing that I heard about the 2 Mental Health Course (see Note 16 below) at the LSE applied for a Commonwealth Scholarship [9] and got it. It really came through residential work. A.C. Can you describe what the approved school was like? K.M. It was at Addlestone, The Princess Mary Village Homes,[10] and it was run by a very interesting and quite fey lady, run on the old fashioned lines of houses and a school for girls, all girls lots of girls of all ages on a big compound. So I did a housemother’s job. A.C. Can I ask how old you were when you did that? K.M. I was 22. I don’t suppose the girls were as tough as they are now, but they seemed very tough to me at the time. A.C. What sort of things did you do with them? K.M. We didn’t have the staff like nowadays so I think there may have been a cleaning lady, but mainly I had 20 odd girls and it was as much as I could do to get their meals and get them off to school. A.C. I see. You cooked? K.M. You did everything, or involved the bigger ones in doing it too. I mean you just mucked in. I don’t think I cleaned; there must have been a cleaner. Much more a mother function. The school teachers always seemed very privileged but they lived in too, so they were very much in things. Thinking of the problems they have now, I think the biggest problems we thought we had then were sort of school girl crushes on the teachers which with those rather more hysterical girls got carried to extreme lengths so that this created great problems. But I can’t say anything singular from there as it was really only a holiday job. I didn’t do it so long. The school for maladjusted children was a much longer involvement. A.C. What was that like? K.M. That was a big house, interestingly enough next door to Kate Lewis’s house. [10a] The Lewises were the social leaders in the area and visited us on Christmas Day with the Mayor and so on. So that was my first kind of meeting there. And it took 26 children of all ages from 5 or 6 to girls of 14 or 15 and there was a matron who was a hospital nurse, which caused problems because she wanted everything extraordinarily clean. I was assistant matron so had to see everything was in order and extraordinarily clean! And there was a cook and a gardener. That was the lot, the older girls did the cleaning. So that was the total staff for 26 very maladjusted children. Because being the first home in the country, and with psychological treatment, we really got extremely disturbed children. There was a genuine attempt to run it like a home, if you could have one with that number of children. They had a lot of activities because the gardener and the cook and myself and matron were also prepared to spend lots of other time with the girls. The cook was the sort who would have them in the kitchen doing bits of cooking and I suppose in a way the gardener was the most popular person, but they were all women staff, because the girls would spend ages and ages doing bits of gardening for 3 her, and I would organise some the older girls to do the cleaning, then I’d sit with the girls when they came back from school. They used to wear long woollen stockings and there was an enormous amount of darning so we would have the gramophone on while those who could would sit round darning. Every Saturday morning, the whole school lined up while I looked in their hair, with a saucer of sterilising solution in my hand. I had never had to that before. I remember writing to Olive Bottelle to ask her what a nit was like, not letting on.